The Story on Morning Glory

• Meatloaf:
• 1 cup Whole Milk
• 6 slices White Bread
• 2 pounds Ground Beef
• 1 cup (heaping) Freshly Grated Parmesan Cheese
• 1/4 teaspoon Seasoned Salt
• 3/4 teaspoons Salt
• Freshly Ground Black Pepper
• 1/3 cup Minced Flat-leaf Parsley
• 4 whole Eggs Beaten
• 10 slices Thin/regular Bacon
• Sauce:
• 1-1/2 cup Ketchup
• 1/3 cup Brown Sugar
• 1 teaspoon Dry Mustard
• Tabasco To Taste

Preparation Instructions

Since Christmas is so fancy, I always end up purchasing a lot of things I'll use for only one recipe, things that don't normally adorn my shopping list.  Buttermilk.  Fresh dill.  Green onions.  Horseradish.  Eggnog.  We somehow ended up with 3 jugs of eggnog over the past week.  Each one is open, each one is different.  Regular.  Low-fat.  Alcoholic.  If you want some eggnog, I'm your woman. 

So, what to do!  I hate to waste things.  Especially pricey things like fresh herbs.  With the amount of eggnog I'm hording, I'm planning on making eggnog french toast on New Years Day.  Perhaps eggnog bread pudding one day next week. 

If you know me, you know there are a few things I really love.  And few things do I love more than ranch dressing.  I love it with a capital L!  I could drink it.  I know, that's gross.  And I honestly don't think I've ever done that.  But don't put it past me.  I'm not a huge fan of bottle ranch (I am, after all, a connoisseur) and prefer to use the mix.  But the mix isn't that good, either, and it's full of preservatives.  Funny, I act like I care about preservatives while knowing full well I picked up a bag of jalapeno Cheetos at CVS today.  Forget about the preservatives.  Back to my leftovers! 

I chopped up a big handful of dill, minced up a few green onions, smashed some garlic, and harvested some flat leaf parsley that, for some reason, has survived the recent freezes and is still alive and kickin.  Maybe it doesn't die in the cold weather.  Who knows.  But I'm glad it's there.  Threw it all in there, gave it a stir, and there you have it, home made ranch dressing that is really really good, and low fat to boot!  Light sour cream, light mayo, and low fat buttermilk.  That's not too shabby. 

I don't know about your Christmas feast but mine was GOOD!  Seriously good. 

I was in charge of the meat and I made a prime rib roast that was, if I do say so myself, really yummy.  Last year I made a beef tenderloin, and I felt it left something to be desired.  This year's prime rib roast made up for it!  My sister made a mashed potato casserole (with french fried onions on top...sooooooo good), Jenny brought corn casserole (I love love love corn casserole), and my mom brought a delightful peppermint dessert, complete with homemade pound cake!  It was just wonderful. 

Speaking of yummy winter meals...enter beans and cornbread.

Yesterday I made my first pot of pinto beans...ever...and verdict was?  YUMMY!  These will be a staple on our winter dinner menu. 

I soaked about 2 pounds of pinto beans for 5 hours and while that was soaking, cooked up the most wonderful smelling mixture in the world. 
Half a pound of bacon, chopped,
one onion, diced,
5 cloves of garlic, diced
a handful of cilantro leaves
There is no better smell in the whole world than this.  This sauteed up for quite a while...until the bacon was fully cooked and the onions were getting translucent.
When that was done, I drained the grease off and dumped it in bottom of my crock pot.  Into that mixture, I added 1 tsp of chili powder, cumin and salt. Drained the beans and dumped them on top of that, and topped with a can of drained diced tomatoes.  Filled up the crock pot with water, and let them go.  I think it was on low for a few hours, then I cranked it up to high to finish off.

They were DELICIOUS!!!!  Jack loved them, my mom loved them, my (picky) sister loved them, Jeff (who told me he didn't like pinto beans) loved them...yeah, we'll be doing that again. 

My basil plants were out of control this summer...and I loved it!  Basil was in everything.

I hate the winter, all the goodness of my herbs are gone, and it's either spend some exorbitant amount on fresh herbs from the store, or resort to the dried variety.  Which aren't the same.  At all.

So I did a little research.  Come to find out, you can preserve your basil in the freezer!  I read that the best way to do it was to make a pesto type mix, stick it in ice cube trays, and pop it into a freezer bag to use over the winter months.  Um, home made tomato soup?  Take out a cube of basil, toss that mama in there, bam!  Tomato basil soup!  Cook up some pasta, toss a cube in, dinner is served! 

So, here's how it went down on Morning Glory.

Raise your hand if you loathe store bought tortillas? 

Um hum, that's what I thought.  They're so not good.  They taste exactly like cardboard.

But, there is nothing in the world better than a freshly made tortilla, right?  I, personally, could eat about a million of them.  There is nothing like it!  Fajitas made on anything other than a homemade tortilla are less than appealing.  Thank goodness for Central Market, right?  (Strange, that's not the first time I've ever written that.)  It's the perfect fix.  You get your homemade tortillas in your own home to make your own homemade fajitas! 

Tonight I wanted to make fajitas.  Yum!  I knew all I had were cardboard tortillas in the fridge, so a stop to CM was a must!  Only things that are a "must" sometimes become a "can't" when you throw a 1 year old in the mix.  Jack's teething like crazy right now...random bouts of sobbing, refusing to nap, throwing his food to Vincent instead of eating it...good times.  So, basically he's eating only grilled cheese sandwiches and blueberries (because it's the only thing he'll eat instead of tossing) and napping whenever he wants to.  And today he chose to nap on the way home from the zoo.  Which was when I wanted to go to CM.  So, home we went and a conundrum I was in.  I couldn't do the cardboard tortillas.  So.............I turned to the Pioneer Woman. 

Ree Drummond is pretty darn amazing, and she knows how to do anything.  Including making homemade tortillas.  And she should.  She's amazing. 

I did a little search, found her recipe and got started!  I followed her directions, but halved the recipe, since I'm cooking for a family of 3 and she cooks for a family of like 6 or something.  I also used Crisco instead of lard.  I didn't have any lard on hand, believe it or not.  And...it...was...so good!  I followed her advice and rolled my tortillas super thin, but think  I might go a little thicker next time.  I used my cast iron skillet and it worked perfectly.  Once you are past the resting phases, it goes really quickly!  I probably did my half of a recipe in 5 minutes, rolling out one while one is in the pan.

The best thing was the soundtrack of the sobbing, tearless 1 year old who only wanted all of my attention...not wanting to take a mommy break for a few seconds at a time.  A 1 year old who didn't want juice, didn't want his paci, didn't want his talking bear, didn't want his magnet toy, didn't want Monk, didn't want the ice he's been chomping on to ease the teething.  He wanting nothing but mommy holding him.  And to be outside.  It was a rough 5 minutes in our house. 

But we made it through and the tortillas were fab and totally made the meal!  And I'll be making my own tortillas from now on, thank you! 


I stole this pic from the Pioneer Woman's website.  She does great pics and you should totally look at her recipe of pictures.

Here's Pioneer Woman's tortilla recipe:
Homemade Tortillas



Prep Time 1 Hour30 Minutes
Cook Time 10 Minutes Servings 16 Difficulty Intermediate

Ingredients
■2-½ cups All-purpose Flour
■2-½ teaspoons Baking Powder
■1 teaspoon Kosher Salt
■½ cups Lard Or Vegetable Shortening
■2 Tablespoons (additional) Lard Or Vegetable Shortening\
■1 cup Hot Water

Preparation Instructions:


Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a large wooden bowl. Stir together.
 Add spoonfuls of lard or shortening (use 1/2 cup PLUS 2 tablespoons), then use a pastry cutter to combine the ingredients. Cut mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs.

Slowly pour in hot water, stirring to bring mixture together. Lightly knead dough 30 to 40 times, or until it becomes a cohesive ball of dough and is less sticky. Cover with a tea towel and allow dough to rest for at least an hour.

Roll into ping pong size balls, place on a tray, cover with a tea towel, and allow to rest for another 20 to 30 minutes.

When you’re ready to make the tortillas, head a dark or cast iron griddle to medium/medium-high heat. One by one, roll out balls of dough until very, very thin. Throw tortillas (one by one) onto the griddle. Cook on each side for 20 to 30 seconds, removing while tortillas are still soft but slightly brown in spots. Remove and stack tortillas, and cover with a towel to keep warm. Serve immediately or allow to cool before storing tortillas in a container. To warm, nuke tortillas in the microwave, or wrap in foil and warm in the oven.


Helpful tips:

* Make sure the water you pour in is very warm.
* Allow the dough to rest, both after kneading and after forming into balls.
* Roll out very thin.
* Get the heat right on your stove: Too hot, and the tortilla will burn in spots. Not hot enough, and the tortilla will begin to crisp before you can get it to brown. I get my stove between medium and medium high heat; that seems to do the trick.
* Use a dark griddle or cast iron skillet to brown the tortillas.
* Cook just long enough to lightly brown the tortilla in spots; don’t cook too long or tortillas will crisp. You want them to be soft and pliable when you serve them.
* Finally: Have fun! And enjoy them. They’re absolutely scrumptious.

Last Sunday we hosted a Mexican themed church pot luck supper at our house...yes, we're a little crazy...but it was a great time!!!  About 60 people, big and small, packed into our Morning Glory home to fellowship over some yummy, yummy Mexican treats.  It was the hottest day of the year so far, and my biggest fear is that people would die of heat stroke.  Our 50 year old "Weathermaker" is large and in charge, doing a good job of keeping the house cool...but 60 people and 105 heat just might put it over the edge!  EEK!

I made some sour cream chicken enchiladas, and I've got to share the sour cream sauce recipe. It's to die for. (Can you tell I like Mexican food? I seem to get very dramatic about it.)

Sour Cream Sauce

1/4 c butter
1/4 c flour
1 can chicken stock
1 c sour cream
1 can green chili's

Melt the butter in a big sauce pan. Once it's melted, dump in the flour and stir constantly until it's well mixed, making your roux. Once that's well blended and browning, add in your chicken broth. Once it's mixed well, remove it from the heat and add in your sour cream and chili's. Sometimes, if I'm feeling spicy, I add in a little jalapeno juice from the jalapeno jar. Mix it up and eat it up!

To make your enchiladas, just chop up some boiled chicken and toss it in a corn tortilla. Top it with cheese, and roll it up! Fill your pan with the enchiladas and pour the sauce over it. Sprinkle with a little cheddar and pop it in the over until the cheese is melted.

Yum, yum, yum!

On Sunday, I made it into an enchilada casserole...just to make it more pot luck friendly! So I just layered my chicken, cheese, tortilla and sour cream sauce in my crock pot and let the sucker go! It was a big hit. I could also see using the sauce over some chicken, black beans, and rice. It's so good, I literally lick the pan.  It's also a super yummy dip.

The Mexican fiesta food was delicious.  From grandma's queso, to El Chico's guacamole (recipe rumored to be stolen from a former employee), to some Mexican lasagna, there was definitely not a shortage of food or conversation!  And I think we still have about 5 bags of left over chips.  I'm thinking it's time to make some salsa! 

The BEST leftovers, I have to say, is a bag of Julio's corn chips.  I'm not kidding, ya'll.  These chips are TO DIE FOR!  I can't even put it into words.  While I was in college I worked at a youth camp down in the Texas Hill Country.  We had a lot of kids from San Angelo, and pretty much all of them would bring these Julio's chips.  One taste turned to a few handfuls, turned into a few bags, turned into an obsession. 

It's so freakin' hot outside these days...there's nothing do to that doesn't involve a lot of sweating, which is bad for everyone.  So, life is boring right now.  We go swimming (which I must take pictures of!) and that's about it.  So, that's why I have nothing to write about but cooking.  Because basically my day consists of waking up at 5:45 am (thank you, Jack) thinking about dinner, making sure I have everything for dinner, getting excited about dinner, cooking dinner, eating dinner, saying that dinner was good, and going to bed...mixed in with a lot of being a mamma.  Hence the onslaught of recipes lately.  One day life will get more interesting and so will my blog...but until then, hopefully you enjoy the recipes!

I've found that the more I cook, the more boring I get with the things I cook.  I mean, you can't beat a good ole fajita night, but when I get lazy, I get boring, when I get boring, I cook chicken marinated in some kind of marinade with a salad....over and over and over and over...boring. 

When my friend Sarah made cashew chicken a few weeks ago for our Bible study, it inspired me to get my Asian cooking on.  (Jeff recently taught me that calling people or places "oriental" wasn't PC...so now I know to call things "Asian"...rugs are oiental, people are Asian...that's my PSA about all things Asian.)  Up until a few years ago, I swore I hated Asian food.  Hated it.  Truth be told, I really had never tried it.  I'd just heard about nasty Chinese buffets.  And growing up in small town east Texas, there weren't a lot of Asian restaurants to try out. 

Then one day I was introduced to Pei Wei.  Ok, not totally authentic Asian food, but yummy none the less, and gave me confidence to quit saying I hated Asian food and give it a try.  Now I love it!  From sushi to fried rice, it's one of my favorites.  Only second to Mexican food...but mainly because Mexican has the whole chips and salsa going for it.  You simply can't beat that.

I digress.  I don't ever cook Asian food just because I'm not familiar with it.  I mean, Mexican food?  Do you have beans?  Do you have cheese?  Do you have tortillas?  You've got dinner.  Easy enough.  But not being as confident in the Asian flavors, I haven't done much of it. 

This week, I decided to brave the Asian food dinner.  I love friend rice, seen the hibachi guys make, so I thought I'd start with that.  I was doing some research for a good recipe and stumbled across this Shiok website.  The best thing that I read about fried rice is this:

One of the most common questions I get as a chef is about making good fried rice. This usually puzzles me because "fried rice" in Asian food is hardly haute cuisine. In fact, it's the very opposite of it. Fried rice is not one single dish. It is more of a way of combining leftover rice with leftover anything else and turning it into a one-dish meal...fried rice is more of a formula than a single recipe.

I love reading that!  I can do left overs with few boundries!  So, reading on, the chef gives some great tips on how to get your rice ready to be fried and a few other tips that were really really helpful.  The biggest thing he stated over and over again is that your rice can not be freshly cooked to be fried up right.  It should be old...at least hours old, but better if it's days old, and cold or even frozen.  Interesting.

I have a torrid relationship with rice.  I don't like minute rice, and every time I've tried to make old fashioned rice, I've either burned it or it's been soupy.  Not good.  At all.  So with my fried rice adventure looming in the foreground, I decided it was time to spring for a rice cooker!  And it is...amazing.  It's huge, can cook up to 20 cups of rice (no, I can't think of a time that I'll need 20 cups of rice, but if there ever is a need, I'll be there) and cook it PERFECTLY!  It was so easy...dump in the rice, dump in the water, snap the top, press the button...30 minutes later, perfectly cooked rice! 

So I cooked my rice Monday morning early and stuck it in the fridge to cool and then the freezer to get it really ready to get fried.  And I have to say...maybe it was beginner's luck, but my fried rice turned out GOOD! 

So, here's a basic run down of what I did.  I didn't measure things out, I just kinda went with the flow...

Fried Rice:

To start off, I marinated some chicken breasts in a yummy Lawry's Sesame Ginger marinade (YUM), diced it up into bite sized pieces and fried them up in the skillet in a little sesame oil.  After the chicken was cooked, I took it out and set it aside. 

Now for the rice. 

• Put a few turns of oil (I used sesame because I had it, but you could also use canola or vegetable)in a large skillet and start heating it up.  (FYI, I don't have a wok, but the huge skillet worked just fine).  You don't want too much oil or it will be too greasy...so go light, you can always add more later.
• Smash a few cloves of garlic and toss them in the oil to infuse the oil with flavor. 
• Slice a few thin slices of fresh ginger and toss those in the oil to get that ginger flavor mixed with the garlic. 
• Once the garlic and ginger pieces brown, take them out. 
• Now, toss in your cold rice.  Stir fry it around for a few minutes, warming up the rice and coating it with oil. 
• Once it's warmed, toss in your choice steamed veggies.  I used carrots and peas, but next time I want to toss in some water chestnuts.  I love their crunch!  And bean sprouts.  Stir fry for a bit until everything's warmed. 
• Toss in the chicken and continue to stir fry. 
• Push aside the rice in the skillet to make a "hole" in the middle.  Crack 2 eggs in the hole and saute them until they are kinda set before tossing them with the rice. 
• Add in a little salt and pepper (I also added in a few red pepper flakes and a little ginger) and soy sauce. 
• Stir it up until all mixed and serve! 

I love banana bread.  Who doesn't?  Is there a better smell than banana bread baking in the oven?  And I am going to share with you today the most WONDERFUL banana bread recipe ever.  I'm not kidding.  I get compliments on this bread from every single person I've ever baked the bread for.  And not like "Oh, you're so nice to bring banana bread," type comments, more like "This is the best banana bread ever!" comments. 

When I graduated college, I moved in with my best friend since 3rd grade.  Although we had a rocky start (I was basically a little punk who didn't want to be nice to the new girl) we overcame that unfortunate incident and eventually became best friends!  We were inseparable through grade school and high school, and went our separate ways in college, her to TAMU and me to TCU.  I was so blessed to have her as a friend during those ridiculously trying high school times...who knows where we would have been with out each other!!